This week, Tonia gives the following reasons for why bloggers should write “link posts”:

Linking out gives something valuable to your readers. There is a lot of great information out there, but who has the time to sort through it all? When you share a post or a site that you have found valuable, your readers will be appreciative.

Linking out builds your credibility. Building on the above bullet point, by sharing the valuable information you have found, you establish yourself as an authority.

Linking out builds relationships with other bloggers. They’ll appreciate that you are sending traffic their way and if your post builds on their ideas, it could lead to a continued dialogue and ongoing interactions. Plus, it’s just a great way to support others in our community.

Linking out may help your search results. Search algorithms consider outbound links to related content as a positive thing, so it could help you appear higher in search results.

These are very good reasons. I would like to emphasize the second.

Writing a “link post” – a collection of online resources, whether blog posts or others – helps to establish your own interest in the subject. Eventually this interest should develop into a specialty, and the specialty becomes expertise.

But have you read the other blogs that have written recently on the subject of source citations? Not all of them agree with my philosophies and formats, but these posts should still be read. When blog posts do not agree, in fact, I feel that it is more valuable to the discussion. So go ahead and read all of these posts, and make up your own mind.

[UPDATED, 6 Jan 2012. I have verified that all of the links below still work, and added several new posts (some older, some newer).]

For this to be a real resource of value, I will continue to update this list as new posts are published!

Michael, while I agree that “linking out” gives readers easy access to other voices on the same subject, I disagree with the statement, “Linking out builds credibility.” Our KNOWLEDGE transferred to blog or website CONTENT, such as your posts about citations, gives us credibility. I do think you did a great job of fulfilling this assignment with its 30+ links. : )

[…] Genealogy & History” columns on Examiner.com) know–I am a stickler for full, accurate, and consistent source citations. Here are reconstructed citations, based on what little information I have to go on. Details for […]

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